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Graham Johnson is both mastermind and pianist in this series of Brahms’s complete songs. Volume 4 presents the bass-baritone Robert Holl, famed for his weighty interpretations of this repertoire. Included are all songs of Op 94, as well as the Vie ...» More

Accompanied by Eugene Asti, Sarah Connolly sings songs by Haydn, Brahms, Hahn, Korngold and Weill. Her distinctive, intelligent, warm, bright-sounding mezzo-soprano will be enjoyed by her growing 'army' of fans in this rich, romantic repertoire.» More

Friedländer calls this ‘one of Brahms’s most important creations’—and a creation stitched together it most certainly is, rather than something composed in a single flash of inspiration. The pessimism of Candidus’ poem—having to endure the pangs of loneliness and regret about the past while the rest of creation, rejoicing in the present, goes about the joyful tasks of nature—was bound to appeal to Brahms. Like a gardener cultivating seeds that turn into imposing plants, the composer nurtures tiny cells of ideas and conjures an extraordinary musical construction that blossoms in a greenhouse of heated emotion. The composer’s recycling and transformation of his material, whereby an initial pocket handkerchief of ideas is transformed into a vista, is the work of a master of musical landscapes. The melody itself, grafted on to an awkward 6/4 rhythm, is nothing to speak of—it seems singularly unsuited for the return of birds (swallows and storks) in flight until one realizes that the strangely halting prosody (the vocal line seems always to sound slightly behind the beat as if the singer were an unwilling participant in such self-revelation) is a woebegone reaction to these happy events rather than a description of them.

An upward drift of arpeggios gently nudges the music forward as the composer unfolds the point of the song—the contrast between the ‘neues Glück’ of rebirth in springtime (already gently sad in the recounting) and the disturbing ‘Liebesharm’ of old love, dwelt upon and remembered. The rhythm of the vocal line which seems to hang tenaciously and somewhat grimly on to the stave betokens a kind of obsession, an unwillingness to let go. At ‘Es ist, als ob mich leise / Wer auf die Schulter schlug’ the song takes off, as if the composer, at first tentative, is now unafraid of confession. The piano-writing briefly rises to a higher and eerier tessitura as if a ghostly spirit had touched him on the shoulder; mention of pigeon’s wings achieves here a flutter in the accompaniment where swallow and stork had failed, although these flapping quavers are now conflated with the churning of old emotions.

With the seemingly innocuous smell of jasmine (and the absence of the flowers themselves) come musical directions to move forward with stronger impetus (bewegter and then immer bewegter und stärker). Waves of intense emotion are out of proportion with the poetic imagery that has induced them. This aching moment of Proustian recall is a brief outburst, however; the idea of an ‘old dream’ reintroduces those aimless, drifting quavers and the bereft lilt of a vocal line in 6/4 with its many tie marks, as if to tie the singer’s emotions in knots. The postlude leaves everything up in the air and unresolved; at the close dotted-minim chords, suspended in the treble clef, hover over the stave like the faint scent of jasmine from long ago.

It is clear that the lovelorn memories of Candidus mightily appealed to Brahms. The poet was in his fifties when he published his Vermischte Gedichte in 1869 and, as a man of the cloth, in a mood for renunciation; the composer was still only forty-three. Passion and true love have been reduced to dreams, echoes and old fragrances and, in the case of this song, gossamer threads of thought and cobwebs of regret. As in Alte Liebe the music is seemingly conjured from nothing, as if the composer were idly improvising at the keyboard (or more likely, on paper) searching for a pattern, however initially unpromising, that he might then quixotically decide to work up into song immortality. In doing this the composer is completely fulfilling Candidus’ notion of ‘Hirngespinnste’ where the human brain toys with ideas as they pass.

Most of the song is a three-part invention (the enmeshing of a vocal line with two lines in the accompaniment), a weaving of threads as suggested by the poetic imagery, and a bow in the direction of the counterpoint of Bach. The carefully arranged dissonances and touches of mirror-image imitation endeared this song to Brahms’s discerning friends, the Herzogenbergs. It is easy to see why: the compositional process is so fascinating, and the discipline and refinement of the song’s texture are such that one forgets and forgives a lack of melodic inspiration. As with so many songs of Brahms, the form is strophic (the poem divided into two quatrains) but the composer cannot resist modifications: in this case at the end of the song where it is clear that he has no high hopes for his own fate that hangs in the balance. The mournful tessitura of the vocal line of the last ten bars makes this clear enough, the elongation of a semibreve of the word ‘hangen’ especially noticeable. The sparse rigours that characterize the piano-writing for most of the song here give way to a kind of elegiac effulgence, as if the composer has realized that on this beautiful summer day the airy threads of the past have gradually woven for him a winding-sheet of bitter-sweet reminiscences. Instead of casting such a garment aside, Brahms luxuriates in it, acknowledging the while that it fits him exactly. There is acceptance rather than anger here, as if pain was an old and familiar friend whose company the composer found more congenial than that imposter happiness.

Like Schumann, in songs like the Kerner setting Stille Tränen or the Reinick Liebesbotschaft, Brahms was capable of producing a blockbuster tune, once heard never forgotten, the kind of thing that might be exploited in our own times as stirring film-music. O kühler Wald has exactly this kind of stirring melodic inevitability. It is certainly a great favourite in the concert hall (Julius Stockhausen loved to sing it), even if the song is rather too brief to be considered a quintessential Brahms masterpiece; it is perhaps a pity that the composer chose to omit the second and fourth verses of Brentano’s poem. For the first strophe the vocal line is supported by the throb of stately crotchets, mostly in the bass clef as if an accompaniment for an old chorale. The song’s original key is for low voice; the darkly shaded tessitura and sumptuous tonality place us in the cool depths of a forest (compare the soothing depths of a lake in Dein blaues Auge).

The second strophe (‘Im Herzen tief’) begins deceptively with its first line set to portentous minims and semibreves, as if a verse were ending rather than beginning. This sets up the tantalizingly delayed return of the unforgettable melody to splendid effect with undulating quavers now illustrating the rustling of trees and branches, Brahmsian ‘forest murmurs’. The poem’s final line (which is repeated, then partially repeated again) has the lover’s songs disappearing into thin air as if subsumed in the vastness of dense foliage. The idea of ‘Wald’ occupies an ineffably important, almost mystical place in German culture and myth—and more than one song by this composer testifies to his enthusiasm, almost a patriotic fervour, for this kind of landscape.

In this imposing song of broad symphonic sweep the piano creates wave after wave of quasi-orchestral sonorities. The theme of the song, lovelorn contemplation on the seashore, is related to the Ferrand setting Treue Liebe, Op 7 No 1, but the tradition of noble and grandiose lament (albeit more usually assigned to the female voice) goes back at least as far as Schubert’s Des Mädchens Klage, if not to Purcell’s Dido. Most pianists relish the chance to play this kind of roaring and splashing water music, so different from the rarefied aquatic meanderings of O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück. The sea may rage, as it certainly does here (Sams calls it a ‘subdued concerto’, as if to remind the pianist that questions of balance have to be considered), but the overall shape of the song is curiously static, as if the singer—transfixed by his dilemma—is unable to bring any of the movement and flexibility of the accompaniment (here standing-in for nature) into his own tormented life. The accompaniment, with its clipped and vehement melody, its sprung rhythm and splashy chords, is confined to the middle of the keyboard, incorporating occasional notes in the bass.

This boxing-in of the vocal and pianistic range suggests submission (‘Ergebung’) but there is nothing craven about this valiant music; in the midst of this buffeting the overall effect is of tremendous stoicism. Like other songs in this opus number Brahms favours a strophic form with modifications. In this case he makes small but significant changes in the last verse when the singer bemoans his ‘ungestümes Herz’ and the vocal line becomes more subjective and impassioned. This outburst, however, does little to loosen the musical straitjacket whereby the vigilant composer only briefly allows us a personal glimpse into the heartbreak and loneliness that have given rise to eruptions of this kind. A song like Verzagen can sound pretty wild, but in reality its formal discipline and reined-in emotion define the difference between German song and Italian operatic verismo. It was Brahms who set these lieder parameters for the later part of the nineteenth century.

A thousand times I’ve vowed Not to trust this bottle, Yet I feel as if new-born, When my cup-bearer shows it me from afar. Everything about it merits praise, Crystal glass and crimson wine; Once the cork is drawn, It’s empty and I’ve no control.

A thousand times I’ve vowed Not to trust this traitress, And yet I feel as if new-born, When she lets me gaze in her eyes. Let her treat me Like the strongest man was treated— Set your shears to my hair, Adorable Delilah!

Goethe had long been interested in the story of Samson. He knew the Handel oratorio of that name and, in May 1812, his close friend, the Berlin composer Zelter, attempted to interest the poet in writing him a libretto for a modern treatment of the subject. Goethe declined the request while restating his fascination with a biblical hero who destroyed the temple of his enemies while taking his own life (thus described, in our own time, as the first suicide bomber). In this rumbustious drinking lyric, the poet burnishes the biblical story by equipping Delilah with her own shears. Brahms, somewhat wary of setting this over-famous poet, searched the lesser-known reaches of Goethe’s Werke in order to find this obscure lyric, with its echoes of the West-östlicher Divan whilst not belonging to that collection. A printed bracket under the first three bars of the left-hand stave states ‘D. Scarlatti’ (these three bars are, in fact, a quotation—in octaves between the hands—from that composer’s D major sonata, Kk223). This sonata is one in a very large selection published by Czerny, which was known to Brahms. Schumann, writing a critique of the same publication in 1839, had stated that Scarlatti’s sonatas were wonderful, but they needed to be taken in moderation. In 1885, when sending these works to his friend Billroth, Brahms, echoing the words of his mentor, also advocated taking them in modest portions. With the greatest skill the ebullient Scarlatti style is transmogrified into Brahmsian turns of phrase; the result is a celebration of drink incorporating, by quotation, the composer’s own ironic, and coded, warning about drinking (or womanizing) to an excessive degree. This increasingly macho celebration of drinking and popping corks is a rare comic masterpiece, and yet the composer has it both ways: the music strikes a defiantly bibulous stance, but the link with Schumann’s reaction to Scarlatti reminds us that the immoderate drinker is vulnerable to brewer’s droop, and worse, Delilah’s shears. Brahms’s own title, however, is ‘Invincible’ and he allows his protagonist to finish the song with untypical abandon, followed by a hiccupping staccato postlude worthy of Ravel’s Chanson à boire.